[Web-SIG] Other kinds of environment variables

[Mark Nottingham]

On Aug 26, 2004, at 5:03 PM, Ian Bicking wrote:

>> * cache validation - does the server handle If-Modified-Since and 
>> If-None-Match requests appropriately (e.g., with a 304)?
>
> I would almost certainly expect this to be false.  There may be some 
> WSGI servers that have an extended notion of the application, so they 
> can look at things like the modification date.  But those are likely 
> to be uncommon -- more likely only applications will know the 
> necessary information.

Apache CGI does it; i.e., if you set a Last-Modified header, it'll 
automagically handle validation for you.

This is pretty old, but gives an indication of what Web servers do in 
this and other regards:
   http://www.mnot.net/papers/capabilities.pdf


> When I think of middleware, I can think of many things like this.  In 
> most cases, I'd add a key, and if the key wasn't present I'd know it 
> was false.  But it can be odd.  Say I have a middleware that catches 
> exceptions, because that's my one example at the moment.  If it is 
> present, it would be nice if other applications didn't catch 
> exceptions, and let them propagate all the way up.  So, the 
> application looks for 
> environ.get('ianb_middleware.exception_catcher')?  That's weird, 
> because someone else comes along and makes their own exception catcher 
> that works like mine; what key do they use?  It would be nice if we 
> used the same key.
>
> But then, at this point I might suggest we use 
> 'webapp0.exception_catcher', leading up to a Web App standard that 
> defines the meaning for a bunch more keys ('webapp1.exception_catcher' 
> once we agree on a standard).
>
> Anyway, that's my theory on how this might go.

I can totally see this stuff happening on a more ad hoc basis. We did 
similar things at Akamai; i.e., putting together a 
dynamically-configured pipeline of handlers to implement HTTP 
functionality, as well as content transforms. Very useful and very 
cool.

--
Mark Nottingham     http://www.mnot.net/